The Key to a Ty France Rebound

03/30/2025 09:15 AM

If one comes, driving the ball the opposite way might be the biggest reason why

When first baseman Ty France signed a non-roster, $1-million major league deal with the Twins in mid-February, it didn't figure to be a major move for the club. After all, there is no harm in adding some veteran depth and Spring Training competition at an unsettled position.

Following Carlos Santana's departure back to Cleveland and Alex Kirilloff's decision to retire, the Twins seemed content for most of the winter to enter 2025 with first base being handled by some combination of José Miranda and Edouard Julien. While both of those still-young-but-no-longer-prospects have had fleeting successes in the big leagues, neither has sustained high-level play for a full season, leaving first base as a question mark.

Even with the uncertainty of Miranda and Julien, it was a surprise when Rocco Baldelli went out of his way to express to the media when France's signing was announced that he was viewed as much more than veteran grist for the Spring Training mill. "He's going to play a lot," Baldelli told reporters. "That's really the best way of saying it. The kind of hitter that he is, this isn't a platoon situation. I think he's going to play."

That announcement was unexpected because of France's struggles at the plate the past two seasons. If the Twins had somehow acquired him to man first after 2021 or 2022, when France delivered 129 and 127 wRC+ marks, there would have been significantly more excitement and hoopla about the move, and handing him a starting job would have been straightforward. But France dipped to 105 wRC+ in 2023 and just 93 wRC+ last season, making it far from clear that he would be an improvement over the in-house options.

To France's credit, he showed exceedingly well in Minnesota's spring camp, reaching base in half of his 48 plate appearances and cracking eight extra base hits. I don't recommend taking a lot of meaning from a few dozen spring training at-bats. It's far too small of a sample size for us to take away much of anything besides the fact that France appears to be fully healthy after a painful heel fracture severely limited him in the second half last year. But showing strong production heading into the season is preferred to the alternative.

Injuries to Brooks Lee and Royce Lewis late in camp made any remaining concerns about France being on the roster moot, and he was penciled in at first base on Opening Day in St. Louis.

With France seemingly locked into a regular role in the lineup, I thought it might be worth analyzing his past work to see if there are any obvious culprits for his struggles the past two seasons. Pinpointing those might give us some indicators to watch for this season as we find out if a bounce back is in the offing.

The Numbers

France is an aggressive, high-contact hitter. For his career, he's swung at 51.2% of the pitches he's been thrown, which is about 4 points above the 47.2% MLB average. He's made contact on 87.7% of his swings on pitches in the strike zone, almost 6 points above the average. His whiff rate, naturally then, is about 3.5 points below the league norm.

Let's start the analysis by taking a look at his seasonal top line numbers to see what stands out:

His aggression and frequent contact have consistently resulted in a better-than-average strikeout rate (MLB: 22.2%) and a lower-than-average walk rate (MLB: 8.4%). The top table shows that he's declined in every category in each successive season. That pattern is true throughout, but those drops were most acute from 2022 to 2023.

The Nagging Injury Explanation

Perhaps the most straightforward way to explain the changes in performance is injury-related. France has suffered, and then mostly tried to play through, two injuries in the past three seasons that have impacted his production at the plate.

The first was a scary-looking collision at first base in June 2022 that injured his left elbow. Before that collision, France was running a .379 wOBA and 157 wRC+. After a two-week injured list stay, he returned for the rest of the season but produced only .294 wOBA and 96 wRC+.

France then struggled again in 2023, suggesting to the Seattle Times' Adam Jude late that season that his issues at the plate may have had their roots in bad swing habits he picked up in 2022 trying to compensate for the pain in his elbow.

"I just haven't really been able to find my swing since the All-Star break last year. I've been trying to find it, but it just hasn't been able to happen. Last year, trying to play through what I did, it kind of just threw me off mechanically. And it takes a while to fix bad habits. I'm not saying it should take this long. But I've been trying to figure out what's going on and compensate. It just hasn't been there."

Peek again at the table above, and you'll see that France's power output fell significantly in 2023. If we dig into his batted ball profile and contact quality metrics, we can see the impacts of those unwanted habits:

France has never been a big slugger who produces extremely high exit velocities. The MLB average mark during France's career has been 88.5 mph, which is right around the upper end of what France has produced. The highest percentile he has managed in a season in that category was the 43rd. He produced well in 2022 with a 24th percentile average exit velocity and had similar marks in 2023. It doesn't appear that how hard France hit the ball changed significantly.

What did change was how often he hit the ball in the air, highlighted in red. In 2023, his average launch angle and percentage of batted balls hit in the air — fly balls, line drives, and pop-ups — increased meaningfully from prior levels.

At that same time, he started to put the ball in play to his pull side more often:

Some of that was attributable to the mechanical issues, and some likely was a response to opposing pitchers changing how they pitched to him. The mix of pitch types he faced did not show significant shifts, but the data are clear that opposing pitchers leaned into working him up in the zone and working him inside:

The launch angle of batted balls is correlated with the height of the pitch, so France producing more batted balls in the air and to his pull side against more pitches in these locations are not surprising outcomes.

In what was the worst stretch of France's career to that point, he was pulling the ball in the air more often. Now, typically, we might celebrate that adjustment as a positive one. After all, I have been telling you for years that pulling the ball in the air is the most efficient path to offensive production.

But it's not for everyone. As was the case for Trevor Larnach, it didn't work very well for Ty France.

In France's case, the new pull-side focus offered him little marginal benefit and negatively affected something that had previously been a significant strength: hitting the ball the opposite way.

(Here, I'll also note that while France does not show a significant home and road split, Seattle's T-Mobile Park is the major league's least friendly to right-handed hitters overall and suppresses the carry of pulled fly balls by about five feet compared to the average MLB park. Seattle is not a good place to get pull happy.)

Something lost?

Across 2021 and 2022, France was 12th in the major leagues with 90 hits to the opposite field. He had 41 in 2021 and 49 in 2022. During 2023, France only had 26 oppo hits, which tied for 105th.

That decline was due in part to the reduced volume of batted balls in that direction but also because he got worse results when he hit the ball that way. In 2021 and 2022 combined, France had a .353 batting average and .443 slugging percentage when hitting the opposite way. In 2023, he hit just .255 and .382 in those respective categories.

Much of that reduced performance appears attributable to France hitting the ball in the air more:

Instead of shooting liners and grounders through the infield for hits, like this one:

France had more of these lazy flies that went for outs:

Whatever the habits that France picked up following the collision hurt his ability to drive the ball the other way. His average exit velocity on batted balls hit the opposite way fell by almost 3 miles per hour, and his average launch angle that way increased about 5 degrees, leading to those weak flies. Consequently, his BABIP to the opposite field fell more than 100 points from the prior two seasons.

(For completeness, it is also worth mentioning that the rule changes to limit defensive shifts were implemented before the 2023 season. France was rarely shifted against before the ban, and I didn't find much to suggest this drove France's decline in production to the opposite field, but it's possible that it had an impact on his thinking about going that way.)

A Bounce Back in 2025?

Since joining the Twins, France has been open about discussing his work in the offseason before last season at Driveline to get into hitting analytics and clean up those bad habits in his swing.

An eagle-eyed reader might have noticed that I included last season's numbers in the tables in this article. These numbers reveal that France returned to hitting the ball the opposite way last season (30%).

But then came the next injury in early June, this time the result of a hit by pitch. At the time of that injury, he was hitting .251/.329/.403, which worked out to a .322 wOBA and 117 wRC+. Those marks might not have been quite to the levels of his 2021-2022 peak, but they suggested a solid bounce back from his 2023 lows. Importantly, France had hit .339, slugged .505, and had 37 hits when going the opposite way, all mostly in line with his previous best work.

After a short injured list stint, France again tried to play through the injury. And again, he struggled, batting just .220/.285/.336 (73 wRC+) the rest of the way, which tanked his overall seasonal numbers and obscured the good start he'd gotten off to.

This spring, he's discussed how last season's foot injury created ripple effects throughout his swing in the second half, including sapping his ability to hit the ball with authority. He's also discussed feeling like he got too focused on the analytics and the details of his mechanics after the Driveline work, which he felt complicated his thought process as the injury effects snowballed.

Now healthy, France is back trying to keep things simple, telling Dan Hayes this spring, "Just getting back to those roots. I mean, I'm sure you guys know the game is developing, and there is a lot of analytical stuff involved. When I'm at my best, I'm not focused on that. I'm more so just simplifying hitting. … I don't want to complicate the game. I'm not going to go out here and try to be something I'm not. I'm going to go out and play my game."

That game is using the whole field and driving pitches on a line toward right-center field. If you're looking for an early indicator that a Ty France bounce-back is coming in 2025, keep an eye on how often he drives the ball that way. In the season's first two games, France has driven the ball that way four times. If two games can be an indication, so far, so good.

John writes for Twinkie Town, Twins Daily, and Pitcher List, with an emphasis on analysis. He is a lifelong Twins fan and former college pitcher.